Machiavelli Was a Wuss
Like me, you've probably heard the name "Leo Strauss" brought up in relation to the guiding political philosophy of the Dick Cheney wing of the Bush administration. Strauss was a German Jewish philosopher who emigrated to the United States shortly before World War II and taught at the University of Chicago, where his pupils included Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz among others who later became prominent in neoconservative circles. But what was Strauss actually about?

This article has the goods--and it is some scary stuff indeed. Take a dollop of Marx (religion is "a pious fraud"), a helping of Franco (but it's a great way to keep the people loyal), a dab of Mussolini ("...governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people"), a handful of Goebbels ("perpetual deception" is necessary to retain power) and a bit of Trotsky (perpetual war is a state greatly to be desired), and you've basically got it.

Here we run again into the frustration of the thinking individual: no rational voter would want to empower individuals with such a baleful philosophy, but just as surely, most Americans don't know Leo Strauss from Levi Straus. What's really scary is that George W. Bush probably doesn't, either.